The growth of electronic communication, including electronic marketing and promotions, has given rise to a corresponding growth in the desire to increase the efficacy of such electronic promotions. Empirical studies have shown that the more personalized an electronic promotion is to a recipient, the greater the likelihood of receiving a response to the electronic promotion from the recipient. For example, an e-mail message about an upcoming sale may be delivered to a potential customer who has expressed prior interest in one or more of the sales items, wherein the e-mail message may include one or more hyperlinks redirecting the potential customer to a website or web server providing more information about one or more of the sale products.
It may be desirable that the websites and/or web servers to which a potential customer is redirected, from responding to and/or clicking on links in such e-mail promotions, has information about the responding customer available such that the website may be personalized for the customer as well and/or information about the responsive customer may be tracked by the web servers. For example, rather than requiring a web server (associated with a URL within an e-mail promotion) to look up an identification number associated with the customer on a separate database or information server to find information about the customer by which to personalize a web page, it may be desirable if the web server had this information immediately available, perhaps through the redirecting URL.